Opaque Lucidity

First Cruise

On August 2nd, we will have had our iMac for six months. That's enough time for me to have dug around in the OS, locked it up once and fretted over little scratches on the surface that I can only see when I get really close and turn my head 70 degrees so my cheek is almost against the LCD screen.

This is the finest piece of equipment I have ever owned. It is not flawless; for example, I replaced the keyboard and mouse with a wireless Logitech combo because the Mighty Mouse leaves something to be desired, in my opinion. But in total, I would have no reservations about giving a machine such as this to someone who had never touched a computer before. I would rest easy in the knowledge that they would be using it on day one and that it's nearly impossible for them to break any of the software included with it, including the OS.

A few months after we bought the iMac, Apple rolled out Boot Camp, a utility that resizes partitions on the fly and allows Intel Macs to run Windows XP. Of course I installed it, mainly to see how it worked. It was wonderful, but really nothing more than a curiousity. I haven't used the XP partition more than a handful of times. Put simply, the Mac does everything I need to do with a computer, and does it almost flawlessly.

It will seem slower and slower at its newer siblings come down the Cupertino pipeline, but I am comforted by the fact that I know quite a few people using older G4 Macs who are still getting work done with no problems. Will I be using this iMac in 2010? Probably not, but I'll be using it in 2008, and it will be running the latest version of OSX. Try running Windows Vista (when it finally ships) with bells and whistles engaged on a non-upgraded PC more than two years old and see what happens.